Spiritual Pride and Fleshly Pride

Let this be enough, then, about spiritual pride, said as far as our slender ability allowed with God’s help. As we have said, it attacks Christians who are well advanced. This kind of pride is not familiar to most people or known to them by experience, because most do not aim at reaching perfect purity of heart, so as to come to the stage of these conflicts. Nor have they gained any cleansing from the earlier faults, whose character and remedies we have explained in separate books. It generally attacks only those who have conquered the earlier faults and have almost reached the very top in the virtues. Because our most cunning enemy has not been able to destroy them through a fall of the flesh, he tries to cast them down and overthrow them by a spiritual catastrophe, seeking in this way to rob them of the prizes of their long-standing rewards, won as they were with great labor. [a]

But as for us, who are still entangled in earthly passions, he never stoops to tempt us in this way. He overthrows us by a coarser pride, the kind I have called fleshly. And so I think it right, as I promised, to say a few things about this kind of pride, by which we and men like us are usually affected, and by which the minds of younger men and beginners above all are endangered.